In northeastern Wisconsin, a young program called Medicine Fish is connecting Menominee tribal youth to nature.
The program has already expanded its focus aiming to heal the people and the land by reintroducing buffalo.
Medicine Fish was born out of Bryant Waupoose’s own journey to find belonging. His grandparents raised him on the Menominee reservation until their health declined.
Waupoose’s struggle to find his bearings led him to travel the country. He found resilience among people he met, especially on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.
“When you live wellness, when you live connection, when you live culture, you live identity, you live family with your children, you know; they help our moral compass stay intact,” he says.
In 2019 Waupoose came home wanting to help his own community. He turned to a passion from his youth: fly fishing.
"It has so benefits to it: mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. You’re immersed in the natural environment, which is the greatest wellness center there is," Waupoose says.
In 2021 Medicine Fish held its first youth fly fishing camp on the Oconto River within the reservation.
"Fishing was just a hook. If you go into any classroom and you ask the young people, let me help you become a good relative and a good human being, a lot of them wouldn’t really respond. They’d kind of freeze, right? But if you say, how many of you want to go fishing, everybody will raise their hand," he says.
Waupoose began to see the healing ripple effects. "For us to be out walking along the rivers, in a more modern sense today, we’re in some waders and some boots with a flyrod, but our environmental ethics go way back to our ancestral leaders. It’s a great feeling to be able to share those things with our young people," he says.
Today Waupoose, his brother Donovan and several adult volunteers are working with 20 youth at a time. They meet most weekends throughout the school year, ramping up programming in the summer. "We moved more into kinship and restoring relational value inside of a community, strategically trying to build a core of Medicine Fish youth," Waupoose says.
The program caught the eye of outside organizations and businesses including The Nature Conservancy and Patagonia, providing financial support to Medicine Fish’s work.
Waupoose met someone in Wyoming who provided pivotal to Medicine Fish’s evolution. "Jason Baldes who leads an inspiring movement out there called the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. He invited me to a ceremony and he said, ‘Let me know if you ever want to get buffalo at home and I’ll help you," Waupoose says.
Their handshake led to the Menominee tribe being invited into the InterTribal Buffalo Council.
Medicine Fish set to work preparing for the arrival of ten buffalo. "We fenced for 3 ½ weeks," Waupoose explains. Twelve young people built a fence encompassing 80 acres of tribal land in November 2022. Since then, five more buffalo have joined the herd.
"That ultimately led into restoring buffalo for the first time to our people in over 250 years, through our young people," Waupoose says.
He says the buffalo’s reintroduction stands to both heal the ecosystem and the Menominee people themselves. "Restoring the ecology and the prairies. Those plants, to us, they’re medicines; we have a connection to them," he says.
And Waupoose says the majestic animal add another dimension to the youth’s connection to their ancestral heritage. "Our goals are to continue to add more lands and buffalo here. [To] help us remember and reconnect," he says.
Storytelling and music-making weave in and out of this work. Waupoose shares a song giving thanks composed and sung by his son. Waupoose hopes 20 years from now, the youth of today will take his place in serving the next generation.
"I figured a little something out doing this, and I want to share it and give the opportunity to others to be able to take it even further," Waupoose says.
